Send a personalized PDF to each person by email
Papely writes each person’s data onto your own PDF and emails them the document. Every one travels as its own link, so afterwards you can say who received theirs and who downloaded it.
No credit card · 20 free documents a month
Your July invoice, Ana
Hi Ana, your invoice for July is ready. Download it whenever suits you.
Download invoiceSeventy-four emails, one at a time
Producing the documents is only half of it. The other half is the mailbox: find the right file, put it against the right address, write more or less the same sentence, send, and start again seventy-three times — never once pairing one person’s document with another person’s name. And then there is the part nobody has an answer for. Three weeks later somebody asks whether Marta’s ever arrived, and the only place to look is your sent folder, which proves you pressed send and nothing else.
A link, not an attachment
Each email carries a link to that person’s document rather than the file itself. It is the decision the rest of this page rests on, so it is worth saying plainly what you get for it.
- no size to worry about
- A 40-page catalogue travels the same way a one-page diploma does. Nothing comes back for weighing too much and nothing has to be split across two emails.
- this is where tracking comes from
- An attachment leaves your hands and is never heard from again. A link is a door you still own: it is not an attachment, and that is exactly why you can tell who has downloaded their document.
- fewer corporate blocks
- Plenty of company filters quarantine PDF attachments that arrive from outside. A link gets through more of the time — not always, but the difference is visible on a list of seventy-four.
- it can be downloaded again
- Someone who deleted the document by mistake opens the same link again instead of writing to ask you to resend it. The link does not change and it does not burn on first use — corporate scanners open the URLs in an email before the person does, and an email that only works once would already be spent.
How one send works
Four moves, and only the first two ask anything of you.
- Upload your PDF
- The document your organization already issues is the template. You place the fields on top of it — text, dates, images, QR codes — and everything else on the page stays exactly as it was.
- Bring the list
- One row per person, with a column for the email address and one for the name. Import an .xlsx or a CSV, work from the Google Sheets add-on, or push the rows out of your own system.
- Write the email once
- Subject, message and button text are written a single time and can carry the fields of your data, so each copy arrives addressed to the person reading it rather than to a list.
- Send, then read it
- Papely produces every document, emails it to its own address and keeps one line per recipient. There is nothing left for you to attach and nothing to send by hand.
What comes back
Making the files is where most of this category stops. Papely keeps reading the run after it has left: one line per recipient, four states, and none of them invented.
- sent
- Papely handed the email over for delivery. From this moment that row has a document of its own, at a link of its own.
- delivered
- The receiving server accepted it. This is the state that tells you the address was real and the message got to the other side.
- bounced
- It came back: a typo in a domain, a mailbox that no longer exists. You see which row it was and you fix that one, while the other seventy-three carry on.
- downloaded
- A click reached that person’s link. It is not proof that the document was read, and Papely does not dress it up as one — it is the moment somebody opened the door you sent them.
- Ana Ruiz
- Mateo Duarte
- Hannah Cole
- Ravi Menon
There is no fifth state for “opened”. What Papely reports is what the delivery itself reports back — handed over, accepted, refused, followed — and an opening is none of those. It is left out on purpose; it is not missing.
When the document is personal, ask for a code
A payslip is not a newsletter. On a manual send you can require a code before the download: a box you tick for that run, send by send. It arrives switched off, and it is set when you create the send.
- The code goes to the address the document was sent to. The page has no field that accepts an address, so it cannot be pointed at another mailbox.
- It is six digits and it expires. Asking for a new one retires the previous one, and there is a limit to how many times a code can be tried.
- Once it has been entered, that person downloads again for the next 24 hours without repeating the step — that document and no other.
Verify it's you
We sent a code to
a•••@veltra.co
Download documentThe details that decide whether this fits you
- from
- Every document email leaves from [email protected]. That address is fixed: there is nothing to configure on your own domain, and nothing to change.
- reply-to
- Verify a reply-to address for your workspace and replies land there. Without one, a recipient who hits reply has nowhere useful to write, so it is worth doing once.
- how long the link lasts
- The delivered document is kept for 90 days on Free and two years on Pro; on Enterprise it is not removed on a timer. After that the link still answers — it says the document is no longer available, rather than behaving as if it had never existed.
74 payslips, on the 28th of every month
An accounting firm closes payroll for a client with 74 employees. The payslip is the PDF the client’s software already lays out; Papely writes each person’s figures onto it from the columns of the export. One run: 74 documents, each emailed to its own address, each one asking for a code first, because a payslip is nobody else’s business. By the afternoon the report reads 68 downloaded, five delivered and not downloaded yet, and one address bounced — which is the only line anybody has to do anything about.
Change the PDF and the columns and it is the same month-end for invoices, policies, report cards or membership letters.